A monorail, moving sidewalks, free laptops and iPods are just a few outlandish ideas students, faculty and staff have suggested over the years. While these ideas may cause your knees to grow weak, do not get too excited, because few of their ideas will ever materialize. On a more optimistic note, there are numerous ways the TCU Community can implement a better life on campus.One thing I would like to see happen on campus is for all professors to start using real life examples in the classroom setting. I have sat in many classrooms, as I am sure you have, staring at the board wondering why my professor uses such general examples that do not make me the least bit interested in learning.

For instance, in a statistics course, one will probably see statistics that their professor has pulled from the textbook or another workbook in their offices, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we were to use actual statistics, say from the admissions and retention studies done on campus? If professors were to use numbers that actually mean something to a majority of the class population, class members will get a better understanding of the information.

Take another example of a computer class where students are learning about networking and telecommunication. How could a professor teaching this information implement real life or community examples in their classes? Instead of talking about hypothetical networks, the professor could bring the information down into a form students can personally relate to, like what kind of networks are in use on our campus, and how they effect our communication. Give students a reason to care about learning the information for reasons other than earning good grades.

While some professors already use this approach in teaching students at TCU, I ask all students to lobby for immediate changes in the style of teaching they are receiving in the classroom, for the benefit of all students in our global community.

Austin Uebele, sophomore premajor and Student Government Executive